Ai!

‘Ai!’ is a Portuguese interjection and onomatopoeia used to express a wide range of human emotions and reactions such as complaint, pain, relief, surprise, excitement, disapproval and loss. It is also holophrastic, in as much as it consists of a complex idea expressed in a single sound
  
Ai! is a call for attention. It is a siren! It frames something that’s happening or is about to happen. The Ai! is like the punch line of a joke, the element that turns things upside down and permits us to find another logic of understanding. The Body that ejects the Ai! is a body affected by an external force (visible or invisible) that cannot be controlled.
  
In this research project Lilia Mestre and Marcos Simoes want to see if through the Ai! they can discover something else, something strange and yet known: an alien element introduced by a recognizable sound, the Ai! as a familiar tool to create the unfamiliar. Ai! can take on many forms, be many things and become many spaces.
  
In Ai! Mestre and Simoes develop a physical practice that brings a body charged with a strong sense of catastrophe to the fore. Mestre and Simoes want to observe a body affected by an outside force that gives the impression of being incapable of controlling this force — a body that exists in an illogical space, in paradoxes and incongruities. The body in a space that is ‘out of tune’.